West Virginia Becomes a State
Saturday June 20, 2009
In 1863, West Virginia became 35th state admitted to the Union when it broke away from Confederate Virginia during the Civil War. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, the western portion was against the action. On October 24, 1861, what would later become West Viginia was formed. The US government accepted West Virginia as a state two years later. Interestingly, West Virginia was initially going to be called Kanawha after the Kanawha River.
Comments
When I used to do Civil War Reenacting and do history talks in classrooms this was one subject that I would always ask the teachers and kids. If secession is illegal (that was why the war was fought, right ? yeah right)then why do we have 50 states ? In 1865 after the war was over the State of Virgina asked those Northern counties to return to the State. They said no and the US govt. backed them up. So the question remains if succsession is illegal/wrong then why do we have 50 states ?
Article IV Secion III of the Constitutions says, “…but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the concent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”
I doubt that Virginia gave concent for the western counties to form their own state, so what was the legal rational, I wonder, to create the non-slave state of West Virginia?
Does anyone know?
To Kurt’s question…
Could it be that Virginia (and the other seceded entites) were not states of the Union at that time, thus, no consent was required or available?
Actually, the issue of legal is fuzzy in the Civil War. There is nothing in the Constitution that says states could not leave the Union. At various times states, North and South, argued that they freely joined and could freely leave. If so, then it was a war between two countries, and West Virginia should have had the right not to leave. On the other hand, Lincoln never acknowledge that the Confederate States had left the Union, i.e. he never allowed their stars to be removed from the flag. Therefore, West Virginia shouldn’t have been formed.
I was born and raised in West Virginia, so I’ve studied WV history since I was a little kid. In one of the books I read, Virginia tried to force WV and took it all the way to the Supreme Court. They ruled that Virginia had chosen to leave the Union at that time so the laws of the Union did not apply to them at the time of West Virginia’s succession.
Jeremy, that sounds reasonable.